Adultery The Aarogya Wellness and Intimacy Clinic

[prasannas2001]

 

 
Naveen had looked at her with such patience, such tenderness, and she had felt something inside her crack open, something that had been frozen for so long she had forgotten it was there.
 
She wanted him.
 
She wanted him.
 
She wanted to be a good wife, a normal wife, a wife who could give her husband pleasure and children and a life that looked like everyone else's life.
 
But her body would not obey.
 
It never had.
 
Not when she was fourteen and a boy had tried to kiss her at a cousin's wedding, not when she was nineteen and a college classmate had put his hand on her knee in the dark of a cinema hall.
 
Not even when she touched herself, in the privacy of her own room, in the years before the wedding, even then, her body had refused to give her what she wanted.
 
It was as if there was a wall inside her, a locked door, and she had lost the key so long ago that she no longer remembered what it looked like.
 
She didn't know why.
 
That was the worst part.
 
She had no reason, no memory, no moment of violation she could point to and say there, that's where it happened.
 
There was only a vague, shadowy fear that lived in her chest, a fear with no name and no face, and it woke up every time someone came too close.
 
She had hoped, God, she had hoped, that marriage would change it.
 
That Naveen's gentle hands, his patient eyes, his infinite kindness would be enough to melt the ice inside her.
 
That she would become someone else, someone normal, someone who could lie with her husband without feeling like she was drowning.
 
But she hadn't changed.
 
And now he knew.
 
He knew, and he was still here, and that was somehow worse, because it meant she would have to face him in the morning.
 
She would have to look into his kind eyes and see the disappointment he was too polite to show.
 
She would have to sit across from him at breakfast and pretend that nothing had happened, that she was fine, that they were fine.
 
She couldn't do it.
 
She couldn't.
 
She turned her head on the pillow, looked at the dark shape of him beside her.
 
He slept on his back, one arm flung above his head, his breathing deep and untroubled.
 
He looked peaceful.